When we see records being broken and unprecedented events such as this, the onus is on those who deny any connection to climate change to prove their case. Global warming has fundamentally altered the background conditions that give rise to all weather. In the strictest sense, all weather is now connected to climate change. Kevin Trenberth

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Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Two years ago, Camille Parmesan, a professor at Plymouth University and the University of Texas at Austin, became so “professionally depressed” that she questioned abandoning her research in climate change entirely.

Parmesan has a pretty serious stake in the field. In 2007, she shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for her work as a lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2009, The Atlantic named her one of 27 “Brave Thinkers” for her work on the impacts of climate change on species around the globe. Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg were also on the list.

Despite the accolades, she was fed up. “I felt like here was this huge signal I was finding and no one was paying attention to it,” Parmesan says. “I was really thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’” She ultimately packed up her life here in the States and moved to her husband’s native United Kingdom.

“In the U.S., [climate change] isn’t well-supported by the funding system, and when I give public talks in the U.S., I have to devote the first half of the talk to [the topic] that climate change is really happening,” says Parmesan, now a professor at Plymouth University in England.

Parmesan certainly isn’t the first to experience some sort of climate-change blues. From depression to substance abuse to suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder, growing bodies of research in the relatively new field of psychology of global warming suggest that climate change will take a pretty heavy toll on the human psyche as storms become more destructive and droughts more prolonged. For your everyday environmentalist, the emotional stress suffered by a rapidly changing Earth can result in some pretty substantial anxieties.

For scientists like Parmesan on the front lines of trying to save the planet, the stakes can be that much higher. The ability to process and understand dense climatic data doesn’t necessarily translate to coping with that data’s emotional ramifications. Turns out scientists are people, too.

Climate scientists not only wade knee-deep through doomsday research day in and day out, but given the importance of their work, many also find themselves thrust into a maelstrom of political, ideological, and social debate with increasing frequency.

As Naomi Klein writes in her most recent book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, “We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they were ‘unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.’ ” Talk about a lot of pressure.

Lise Van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist based in Washington, D.C. — and co-author of the National Wildlife Federation’s report — calls this emotional reaction “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” a term she coined to describe the mental anguish that results from preparing for the worst, before it actually happens.

“It’s an intense preoccupation with thoughts we cannot get out of our minds,” Van Susteren says. And for some, it’s a preoccupation that extends well outside of the office. “Everyday irritations as parents and spouses have their place, they’re legitimate,” she says. “But when you’re talking about thousands of years of impacts and species, giving a shit about whether you’re going to get the right soccer equipment or whether you forgot something at school is pretty tough.”

What’s even more deflating for a climate scientist is when sounding the alarm on climatic catastrophes seems to fall on deaf ears. “How would that make you feel? You take this information to someone and they say they don’t believe you, as if it’s a question of beliefs,” says Jeffrey Kiehl, senior scientist for climate change research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. “I’m not talking about religion here, I’m talking about facts. It’s equivalent to a doctor doing extremely detailed observations on someone and concluding that someone needed to have an operation, and the person looks at the doctor and says, ‘I don’t believe you.’ How would a doctor feel in that moment, not think, but feel in that moment?”

Even if scientists did bring a little emotion to their findings — which raises questions about the importance of objectivity in the sciences — Kiehl worries that such honesty would just provide even more fodder for climate deniers.

“I could imagine that if scientists start to talk about how they’re feeling about the issue and how emotional they’re feeling about the issue, those who are critical about climate change would seize that information and use it in any way they could to say that we should reject their science,” he says.

It’s only natural then that many climate scientists and activists often feel an extreme pressure to keep their emotions in check, even when out of the spotlight. For activists like Mike Tidwell — founder of the nonprofit Chesapeake Climate Action Network and author of The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Race to Save America’s Coastal Cities — part of being on the front lines means being outspoken and passionate about the cause. But while activism may be a more forgiving platform to express emotional stresses than within the scientific community, the personal toll of the work goes largely undiscussed.

“You don’t just start talking about unbelievably fast sea-level rise at a cocktail party at a friend’s house,” Tidwell says. “So having to deny the emotional need to talk about what’s on your mind all the time … those are some of the burdens that climate aware scientists and activists have to endure. People talk about climate change, openly talk about activism, and people even talk about how scary it is, and about how screwed we are and unbelievable it is that sea level is rising, and world governments still aren’t doing shit. But nobody talks about how it makes them feel personally.”

So how does a climate scientist handle the stress? Van Susteren offers several “climate trauma survival tips” for those in the field. Meditation and therapy are two, as are taking particular care to reinforce boundaries between work and one’s personal life. But she also says being honest is just as important. “[Don’t] believe that you are invulnerable,” she writes. “In fact, admitting what you are going through makes you more resilient.”

And a dose of honesty may be more than just therapeutic. Some real talk about how we’re all screwed may be just what the climate movement needs. Back in March, Grist’s Brentin Mock wrote that in order to really drive home the urgency of global warming and not just view “climate change only as that thing that happened one year on television to those poor communities in Brooklyn,” maybe it’s OK, when appropriate, to ditch a very limited “just the facts” vocabulary in favor of more emotional language. In other words, he argues that scientists should start dropping F bombs. “Forgive my language here, but if scientists are looking for a clearer language to express the urgency of climate change, there’s no clearer word that expresses that urgency than FUCK,” Mock writes. “We need scientists to speak more of these non-hard science truths, no matter how inconvenient or how dirty.”

Climate deniers aren’t going away anytime soon. But with global organizations like the IPCC reinforcing facts like the 95% certainty that humans are driving global warming, the research is sticking. Perhaps it’s time for those deeply involved in climate science to come forward about the emotional struggle, or at the very least, for those in mental health research and support to start exploring climate change psychology with more fervor. And reaching out to scientists in particular could be a huge opportunity to better explore the world of climate psych, says psychologist psychosocial researcher and consultant Renee Lertzman, a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.

“There’s a taboo talking about it,” Lertzman says, adding that the tight-lipped culture of the scientific community can be difficult to bridge. “We’re just starting to piece that together. The field of the psychology of climate change is still very, very young … I believe there are profound and not well-recognized or understood psychological implications of what I would call being a frontliner. There needs to be a lot more attention given to frontliners and where they’re given support.”

Monday, October 27, 2014

Many people see the effects of Global Warming as ocean waves lapping up to the front doors of their ocean front homes, 100 years from now. This is a nice frightening effect that may help the media sell advertising to the left that reads their outlets, and it may help explode heads in the right wing denialist alternative universe, but it misses the many, many other problems that Global Warming is causing, not a century from now, but right now!

While we in the U.S. are very concerned about the horrible drought the people of California are going through, the people of Brazil are about to experience something that will challenge what it means to be a massive city in a Global Warming world.

Just two months after São Paulo's state-run water utility Sabesp refused to implement water rationing amidst the area's worst drought in eight decades, at least one government official is warning of "dramatic water shortages" and "collapse" for the residents of South America's most populous metro area.

“If the drought continues, residents will face more dramatic water shortages in the short term,” said Vicente Andreu, president of Brazil’s National Water Agency. “If it doesn’t rain, we run the risk that the region will have a collapse like we’ve never seen before."

This is the Cantareira reservoir that supplies a large portion of the water to Sao Paulo.

Around 45% of São Paulo state -- home to more than 40 million people -- gets its water from a four-lake system known as the Cantareira reservoir. Back in August, a study from a federal agency predicted that São Paulo state could run completely dry in 100 days if rationing measures weren't implemented.

As Bloomberg now notes, water levels in Cantareira have dropped to just 3.3% of capacity -- the lowest levels ever -- after the water utility built a piping system to pump the last drops of water from the ailing reservoir. There's speculation amongst government officials that Cantareira will run completely dry in mid-November without rain, the Wall Street Journal reports. Things are not much better at the Alto Tiete reservoir, where water levels are at just 8.5% of capacity.

Well if misery loves company, the people of Brazil might take comfort in knowing they are not alone. From NOAA's drought-monitoring people.

While we tend to think of Global Warming in terms of hotter summers and rising oceans, it's really the extremes of weather that will panic civilization into taking unanticipated actions with unanticipated results. We only need to look around to see our response to 6 Ebola patients in a country of over 300 million, or the Republican fear/hate propaganda machine cranked up over the possibility of ISIS terrorists thousands of miles away streaming across our boarders with children from central America, to see that not having a workable response now will lead to a very bad response when entire American cities need to be moved.

Brazil may be experiencing a historic drought this year, but in a few years the same area may experience biblical floods. Our climate is choking and convulsing on the noxious gasses we're shoving down its lungs. With the right leadership, we can still save the patient from what will be a pretty nasty sickness, but if we keep allowing Right Wing anti-science denialists to make decisions, our civilization will have the same chance of survival as an Ebola patient in Liberia.

Severe winters are more likely over the next few decades due to climate change melting Arctic ice and sending freezing air south, according to new researchby Damian Carrington, The Guardian, October 26, 2014

New research shows that the increased risk of icy winters will persist for the next few decades.Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The risk of severe winters in Europe and northern Asia has been doubled by global warming, according to new research. The counter-intuitive finding is the result of climate change melting the Arctic ice cap and causing new wind patterns that push freezing air and snow southwards.

Severe winters over the last decade have been associated with those years in which the melting of Arctic sea ice was greatest. But the new work is the most comprehensive computer modelling study to date and indicates the frozen winters are being caused by climate change, not simply by natural variations in weather.

“The origin of frequent Eurasian severe winters is global warming,” said Prof Masato Mori, at the University of Tokyo, who led the new research. Climate change is heating the Arctic much faster than lower latitudes and the discovery that the chances of severe winters has already doubled shows that the impacts of global warming are not only a future threat. Melting Arctic ice has also been implicated in recent wet summers in the UK.

The new research, published in Nature Geoscience, shows that the increased risk of icy winters will persist for the next few decades. But beyond that continued global warming overwhelms the colder winter weather. The Arctic is expected to be ice-free in late summer by the 2030s, halting the changes to wind patterns, while climate change will continue to increase average temperatures.

“The agreement between observations in the real world and these computer models is very important in giving us more confidence that this [doubled risk of severe winters] is a real effect,” said Prof Adam Scaife, a climate change expert at the UK Met Office and not part of the research team. “The balance of evidence suggests this is real.”

Dr Colin Summerhayes, at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK, said: “This counterintuitive effect of the global warming that led to the sea ice decline in the first place makes some people think that global warming has stopped. It has not. Although average surface warming has been slower since 2000, the Arctic has gone on warming rapidly throughout this time.”

The melting of sea ice influences Eurasian winters because the open ocean is darker than ice and absorbs more heat. This in turn warms the air above and weakens the high-level winds called the polar vortex. This causes meanders in the jet stream to become stuck in place. This “blocking” pattern pulls freezing air southwards out of the Arctic and, because it is stuck, the resulting severe weather can last for long periods.

Climate scientists have warned for many years that global warming is not simply leading to a slow, gradual rise in temperature. Instead, it is putting more energy into the climate system which drives more frequent extreme events.

“Annual average global temperatures continue to rise, but the distribution of temperature through the year is giving us more extremes, which is highly damaging to food production,” said Prof Peter Wadhams at the University of Cambridge. “As ice continues to retreat, we can expect these weather extremes to continue to occur and maybe worsen.”

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Tiny microbes hidden in the soil are one of the major amplifiers of global warming.

But researchers are unsure whether these microbes are slaves to their environment or the cause of climate change.

Now, scientists from the U.S., Sweden and Australia, claim to have evidence that a single species of microbe found in Sweden may be driving global warming.

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Scientists from the U.S., Sweden and Australia, claim to have shown that a single species of microbe found in Sweden may be driving global warming. The researchers installed special instruments for measuring methane changes using Plexiglas chambers that trap the gases emanating from the soil

The discovery could help scientists improve their simulations of climate change by including data on how microbes control the release of gases, such as methane.

Earlier this year, scientists found a single species of microbe in permafrost soils of northern Sweden that had begun to thaw under the effect of globally rising temperatures.

Researchers suspected that the microbe played a role in global warming by releasing vast amounts of carbon stored in permafrost soil close to the Arctic Circle in the form of methane.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas responsible for trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere.

But the actual role of this microbe - dubbed Methanoflorens stordalenmirensis, which roughly translates to 'methane-bloomer from the Stordalen Mire' - was unknown.

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The discovery in Sweden could help scientists improve their simulations of climate change by including data on how microbes control the release of gases, such as methane

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The international research team installed automated chambers that measure greenhouse gases emanating from the soil as microbes metabolise nutrients previously locked up in the permafrost soil

The new research pins down the role of the new microbe, finding that the amount of Methanoflorens, should help to predict their collective impact on future climate change.

'If you think of the African savanna as an analogy, you could say that both lions and elephants produce carbon dioxide, but they eat different things,' said senior author Scott Saleska, an associate professor at the University of Arizona.

'In Methanoflorens, we discovered the microbial equivalent of an elephant, an organism that plays an enormously important role in what happens to the whole ecosystem.'

DID MICROBES CAUSE THE WORST MASS EXTINCTION IN HISTORY?

Climate-changing microbes, known as Methanosarcina (pictured), may have caused the biggest mass extinction in history

The worst mass extinction in Earth's history - long before dinosaurs roamed the planet - was caused by microbes, according to a recent study.

The tiny organisms suddenly began belching out the greenhouse gas methane - which is about 20% more potent than carbon dioxide - some 250 million years ago.

Fumes spurted from the oceans wiping out 90% of all species, from snails and small crustaceans to early forms of lizards and amphibians in less than 20,000 years.

The 'Great Dying' occurred more than 252 million years ago - long before dinosaurs lived roamed Earth - at the end of Permian era.

In the past asteroids, volcanoes and raging coal fires have been blamed but the finger is now being pointed at tiny microbes called Methanosarcina.

These spewed enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere, dramatically altering the climate and the chemistry of the oceans.

Unable to adapt in time, countless species perished and vanished from the Earth.

Alarmingly, the same effects are starting to happen today as a result of global warming caused by carbon emissions.

The study revealed that because of these microbial activities, all wetlands are not the same when it comes to methane release.

'This has been a major shortcoming of current climate models,' said lead author Carmody McCalley, at the University of New Hampshire.

'They assume the wrong isotope ratio coming out of the wetlands, the models overestimate carbon released by biological processes and underestimate carbon released by human activities such as fossil-fuel burning.'

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To study microbes, researchers drive cores into the ground at Abisko National Park in northern Sweden

One of the big questions facing climate scientists, according to Professor Saleska, is how much of the carbon stored in soils is released into the atmosphere by microbial activity.

'As the "global freezer" of permafrost is failing under the influence of warming, we need to better understand how soil microbes release carbon on a larger, ecosystem-wide level and what is going to happen with it,' he said.

'For years, there's been a debate about whether microbial ecology 'matters' to what an ecosystem collectively does,' added Virginia Rich from the University of Arizona.

'This work shows that microbial ecology matters to a great degree, and that we need to pay more attention to the types of microbes living in those thawing ecosystems.'

Projected temperature change from 2081-2100. One of the big questions facing climate scientists, according to Professor Saleska, is how much of the carbon stored in soils is released into the atmosphere by microbes

The idea that climate change poses serious risks to U.S. national security, long contested in conservative circles, is now an integral part of Pentagon planning. On Oct. 13, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made it official with the release of the Pentagon’s 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, a 16-page document that lays out the effects of extreme weather events and rising temperatures on military training, operations, acquisitions, and infrastructure. Two previous editions, issued in 2012 and 2013, treated climate change as a future threat, but this year’s cast it as a reality that must be dealt with quickly. “Climate change will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the Nation and poses immediate risks,” the document begins.

The Pentagon’s move sets up a showdown between the military, a cautious institution run by some of the most conservative people in the U.S. government, and congressional Republicans, who continue to deny that climate change is real, let alone that it requires action. In May, House Republicans passed an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act forbidding the Defense Department from spending money on any climate-related initiatives, including planning programs. “This amendment will ensure we maximize our military might without diverting funds for a politically motivated agenda,” Representative David McKinley of West Virginia, who sponsored the amendment, wrote in a letter to members of Congress asking for a yes vote. The amendment failed in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“Climate change is a threat multiplier because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we already confront.”—Chuck Hagel

Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, moved to counter that argument in his foreword to the new road map. “Politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning,” he wrote. Hagel is backed by 16 retired generals and admirals who sit on the military advisory board of the CNA Corp., a government-funded nonprofit military research organization. A CNA report issued in May called climate change a “catalyst for conflict,” arguing that the civil war in Syria was rooted in part in a record drought that drove peasants off the land and into cities, where they were susceptible to being recruited by extremist groups. “People are going to have less water, less food,” says Ron Keys, a retired four-star general who commanded all Air Force aircraft and personnel worldwide and now serves on CNA’s military advisory board. “There are going to be huge regional wars around those issues.”

Pentagon planners have sounded alarms about their climate concerns for at least a decade. In 2004, Fortune reported the existence of a secret document that warned climate change could push powers such as China, India, and Pakistan into nuclear war over fresh water supplies. Until now the military has been relatively quiet about its climate concerns, partly “because the Department of Defense gets its money from Congress, and we know where the House is on this issue,” says David Titley, a retired rear admiral and member of CNA’s military advisory board. Hagel’s personal involvement in releasing the 2014 road map suggests the Pentagon has decided it can’t wait any longer.

Photograph by Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times/ReduxChuck Hagel

Not all Republicans are as wedded to climate-change denial as their public statements suggest, according to retired military officials and Republican Hill staff. “If you talk with them privately, without any media around, the vast majority of congressional Republicans know perfectly well that climate change is real,” Titley says. “But they won’t say so publicly because they don’t want to end up like Bob Inglis.”

Inglis, a Republican, represented South Carolina’s 4th congressional district for six terms, amassing a perfect voting record in the eyes of the National Rifle Association and other conservative groups. In 2010, a Tea Party challenger ousted him after seizing on what Inglis has half-jokingly referred to in the press as his “heresy”: insisting that climate change is real. He’s now executive director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a nonprofit based at George Mason University that advocates a free-market approach to addressing climate change. “A lot of people on Capitol Hill are down in their foxholes” on the climate issue, Inglis says. “They’re afraid of getting their heads blown off if they head up the hill.”

To provide political cover, Keys, Titley, and other retired military brass have been traveling the country to explain to ordinary Americans why the military cares about climate change and what extreme weather will mean for their communities. The goal is to shift the political conversation in Washington by changing what voters are willing to hear their leaders say. Since August, Keys has visited Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, and North Carolina to take his message to local Rotary Clubs and businesses, such as a solar electrical co-op run out of a hog house in Dubuque, Iowa. Keys, who says he is “politically very conservative, just to the right of Genghis Khan,” meets with state legislators, mayors, business leaders, civic groups, and “mom and pop on Main Street.” His pitch is simple: Ignoring climate change means leaving Americans exposed to danger. “If I were a bad guy,” Keys says, “I’d look at a moment like Hurricane Katrina as a good time to sneak into the U.S. and try something.”

Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe, a leading denier of climate change, has dismissed CNA’s effort. “There is no one more in pursuit of publicity than a retired military officer,” Inhofe told the New York Times after CNA issued its report in May. Keys says he won’t be deterred. “I spent 40 years as a fighter pilot,” he says. “You’re going to have to come at me with facts.”

Earlier this week, the leadership of Hong Kong’s undemocratic government participated in a live, televised forum with student protesters about the future of democracy in the territory. At the very same time, throughout this week, students calling for fossil-fuel divestment at Harvard University have been engaged in a conscientious and well-organized fast—supported by many students, faculty, and alumni—after their legitimate calls for an open public dialogue with you, over the course of more than two years now, have been rejected. It appears that an open debate about democracy is less threatening to the leaders in Hong Kong and Beijing than the prospect of an open debate about fossil-fuel divestment—and the corrupting influence of fossil-fuel corporations on our American democracy—is to the administration of Harvard University.

I have a personal stake in this debate. I am a member of the Harvard College Class of 1990, deeply engaged in the Divest Harvard campaign, and as I write this, amazing as it may sound, I stand effectively banned from Harvard’s campus because I dared to protest peacefully against your administration’s position on fossil-fuel divestment and your lack of public dialogue with the students. My purpose here is to respectfully inform you that this Sunday, October 26, I’m coming back to campus in an open and conscientious violation of that ban.

On May 30 of this year, as I’m sure you will remember, I and three of my fellow Harvard alumni—holding degrees from the Business School, the Divinity School, the Law School and Kennedy School, and the College—stood silently in front of the stage where you were sitting in Sanders Theater, as you were about to address several hundred Harvard graduates attending their class reunions. With the support of many fellow alums engaged in the divestment campaign, we held a banner with the words “Harvard Alumni For Divestment.” We stood in solidarity with the students of Divest Harvard, and we stood for the kind of action necessary to address climate change, the greatest and most urgent human rights struggle of our time.

As we stood with our banner, we were immediately approached by a plain-clothes security officer—who discreetly attempted (but failed) to rip the banner from my hands—and were told that we would have to leave. When we quietly and respectfully declined to move, uniformed Harvard Police were called in, and we were ushered out of the theater. The whole thing, you will recall, lasted perhaps two minutes. As I walked out, I noticed that you were smiling.

You must admit that we went peacefully. Indeed, everything about our action was peaceful. It’s worth noting that we very purposely did not interrupt your speech, and that as far as we could tell, nothing about our action prevented you from speaking or members of the audience from hearing what you had to say. We were there simply to make our presence and our message known, in a way that could not be ignored, and to bear silent witness to the proceedings—a Harvard reunion event that, as everyone knows, is central to the university’s fundraising operations and therefore of the utmost relevance to the call for divestment.

But this is where it gets interesting, President Faust. Once outside the theater, in the foyer of Memorial Hall, the Harvard Police officers—who were nothing but courteous and professional, simply doing their jobs—informed us that we would not be arrested. At least, not that day. We could have been: Harvard certainly might have arrested us, charged us with trespassing or whatnot, and been done with it—just another civil disobedience protest on an American university campus.

But that isn’t what happened, is it? As we waited quietly, the officer in charge spoke on his phone with someone, presumably a superior officer, and when the call was finished, he told us that we were free to go—with one catch. If we came back onto Harvard property for any reason, he said, we would be subject to arrest. However, he said, if we made an appointment to speak with the chief of the Harvard University Police Department (vested with real police powers in the City of Cambridge), and asked his permission to return to campus, the police chief might agree to rescind this order. It was made very clear that the decision would be the chief’s.

In other words, Harvard appears to have delegated to the chief of its police force the power to decide whether or not four peaceful alumni activists can return to campus for any reason—including to engage in further political speech.

This Sunday, Harvard Faculty for Divestment—the group of more than 160 faculty members who have signed a resolution calling on the university to divest from fossil fuels—is holding a “Faculty Forum on Divestment” in Fong Auditorium. The event is billed as “free and open to the public,” and I plan to be there and to participate in the discussion. I have informed the faculty organizers that I am coming, but they have declined to take a position, one way or the other, as to whether they support my presence there.

I am not asking anyone’s permission to come back to Harvard’s campus for this event. Specifically, I do not recognize the authority of Harvard’s police chief to decide whether or not I can participate in this free and open discussion on the campus of my alma mater. While Harvard may or may not have the legal right to prevent me or to arrest me once I’m there—an interesting question in itself—I firmly believe, along with many others, that in terms of academic values, this order is an illegitimate use of a university’s police powers, clearly intended to intimidate and to suppress speech on this issue.

Whatever happens on Sunday, I and the other banned alumni—like the divestment campaign and the larger climate movement of which we’re a part—are not going away. We’ll be back on campus, with or without permission, to continue engaging in this most important of debates. It would restore some of my faith in this university if you would personally join us, openly and publicly, in this debate.

My wife, also a member of the class of 1990, will be there on Sunday to support me. Together, we have been engaged in the life of the university for 25 years. For the past five years, we and our children, age 10 and 14, have served as a host family for incoming international students. One of them is a current sophomore from Beijing, a place where political freedoms are less than perfect. Another, our newest undergraduate friend, is a freshman from South Africa—a country whose history is a testament to the power of principled political struggle. These students are inheriting a world ravaged by our climate catastrophe. Whether any semblance of a just society remains possible for them and future generations depends on the actions we take today.

I only wish that my action at Harvard this Sunday were unnecessary—that I didn’t have to show my young friends what it takes to defend the principles of free and open speech at the great American university they have worked so hard to attend.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Abraham et al. show that a paper by ‘sceptics’ Spencer and Braswell is rife with unrealistic assumptions in an overly simple modelby John Abraham, "Climate Consensus - The 97%," The Guardian, October 21, 2014

A woman looks at a globe model in the climate village during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-16), in Cancun, 2010.Photograph: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images

It’s hard to find a reputable scientist who denies that human emissions of greenhouse gases are warming the planet and that there will be consequences for human society and the biological health of the planet. There are a few holdouts who, for various reasons, either think humans are not causing warming or that the warming will not have much consequence.

Some members of this vocal minority spend a lot of time trying to convince the public that they are right. They write letters to newspapers, appear in slick movies, give press conferences, promote their views to Congress, and so on. Their high profile gives the public a false sense that there are two relatively equal-sized bodies of experts that cannot agree on climate change; this is not true.

An even smaller subset also tries to publish their views in the scientific literature – the dueling ground for experts. Sometimes these contributions have been useful, adding some nuance to the discussion, but all too often they have proven to be of very poor quality when other scientists have had a chance to dissect them.

A few months ago, I co-authored an article which charted the different quality in scientific output from the Dwindling Few contrarians compared to the majority of experts. My colleague, Dana Nuccitelli, summarized the article here. What we show is that the Dwindling Few have had a very poor track record – having papers rebutted time after time after time because of errors they have made. The low quality of their research has caused journal editors resign, and they have wasted the time of their colleagues who have had to publish the rebuttals to their work.

Well, again this year, I’ve wasted my time (and my colleagues’ time) by rebutting a 2014 paper published by the darling of the Dwindling Few, Roy Spencer. Dr. Spencer wrote a paper earlier this year that used a very simple ocean model to suggest that standard climate models overestimate the Earth’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere. You can see his manuscript here although it is behind a paywall so you will have to shell out about $40 to read it.

Dr. Spencer and his colleague Danny Braswell made a number of basic math and physics errors in the article that call into question their conclusions.

Before we get into the errors, let’s talk about what their model does. They basically treated the ocean like a non-moving fluid and allowed heat to diffuse into the ocean depths. They did allow some mixing in the upper layers through added terms in a one-dimensional equation. The model neglects down-welling or up-welling of waters which occur particularly at the poles. In the end, they end up with a bunch of tunable parameters, which they adjusted so that the model output matches the measured temperature history.

So, what were the errors and poor modeling choices?

The model treats the entire Earth as entirely ocean-covered

The model assigns an ocean process (El Niño cycle) which covers a limited geographic region in the Pacific Ocean as a global phenomenon

The model incorrectly simulates the upper layer of the ocean in the numerical calculation.

The model incorrectly insulates the ocean bottom at 2000 meters depth

The model leads to diffusivity values that are significantly larger than those reported in the literature

The model neglects latent heat transfer between the atmosphere and the ocean surface.

Now, simple models like this one can still be useful, even though they necessarily gloss over some details. But some of these errors and omissions are pretty obvious, and would have been easy to fix. For instance, by treating the entire Earth as water covered, Spencer and Braswell omit 30% of the surface of the Earth that’s land-covered, and which heats up faster than the oceans. They then compare the CO2sensitivity of their ocean-only model to those obtained from more realistic models — apples and oranges. Furthermore, the application of a very local phenomenon (El Niño) to the entire globe just doesn’t make much sense.

But, I here want to talk about the numerical errors, in particular items 3, 4, 6, and 7. In order to explain what went wrong, I need to talk about the underlying math.

The diffusion equation Spencer and Braswell used has a second derivative of temperature with respect to depth in the water. To solve this equation, the common approach is to break the ocean into a number of finite slabs of water and approximate the derivatives by finite differences. So far, so good. The problems arise when you apply what are called boundary conditions. That is, conditions at the ocean surface and the bottom of the ocean. At both locations, Spencer and Braswell’s approach fails.

First, at the ocean surface, you are required to make calculations at the exact surface. In fact, the physical phenomenon which Spencer and Braswell introduce require actual surface temperatures. However, in their computer program, no surface temperatures were ever determined. They basically transcribed a temperature 25 meters deep into the ocean onto the surface (and no, they didn’t do this because of ocean mixing). At the ocean bottom, Spencer and Braswell insulated the ocean, and thereby did not allow any energy exchange there.

Finally, Spencer and Braswell incorrectly used upstream element-diffusivity values in their heat transfer term. They were obligated to use mean values representing adjacent elements. When we implemented the corrected numerical scheme, the quality of the results dissolved. Once again, Roy Spencer has failed in his attempt to show the Earth is not very sensitive to climate change.

These errors are the sort of thing that could have been avoided by consulting any elementary textbook on heat transfer, or any number of papers that have published similar ocean diffusion models. My colleague and co-author, Dr. Barry Bickmore from BYU described the situation like this,

What our paper shows is that Spencer and Braswell’s model was flawed on a very basic level, in such a way that it could have predicted wildly low climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases. Whatever sensitivity their model predicts, the true value is probably significantly higher, and therefore probably in the range indicated by the IPCC.

Spencer and Braswell might object that their paper says ocean temperature measurements “might not provide a very strong constraint on our estimates of climate sensitivity.” Let’s just say that Roy Spencer forgot to include that little detail when he recently told a U.S. Senate committee, “Our most recent peer-reviewed paper on this subject... has arrived at a climate sensitivity of only 1.3 degree C for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, based upon a variety of global measurements, including warming of the global oceans since the 1950s.”

In a recent blog post, Dr. Spencer challenged well-known and well-respected Dr. Andrew Dessler to a debate. While the peanut gallery was busy chiding Dessler for not taking the bait, it perhaps is important to remember that the place where scientists debate is in the scientific literature. It is a venue that has not been kind to Dr. Spencer in the past decade or so. We published our latest work in an open-source journalhere so that any interested reader can see the results for themselves.